Player Xiao Guo had such a game experience more than 20 years ago.
"At that time, there was that kind of on-demand station on the TV. You could use the landline to control the game when you called, and the phone bill was used to settle the game fee, and the number of 0-9 keys was operated. I remember that it took five to six seconds to press it to see the feedback on the screen. ."
Although the form is primitive, it already reflects the advantages and pain points of today's cloud games: on the one hand, cloud games get rid of the shackles of hardware, and provide a solution for children who cannot play at home; on the other hand, the game process often has to bear Very high latency, the experience is hard to say.
In the 20 years since then, cloud games will be mentioned almost every once in a while. Although there are many bright products launched, they have not provided a sufficiently high-quality experience.
With the acceleration of 5G popularization in the past two years, technological advancements such as greater bandwidth and lower latency brought by the new generation of communication technologies have largely met the natural high standards of cloud gaming products, and have improved user experience while bringing In order to achieve more controllable costs. A trend visible to the naked eye is that more and more mainstream manufacturers are beginning to deploy cloud games, relying on associations and other forms to integrate the upstream and downstream industry chains to respond to the opportunities and changes brought about by 5G. At the end of 2019, Douyu Live and 28 leading companies such as Tencent and Huawei became the first members of the "5G Cloud Game Industry Alliance". On the first day of chinajoy half a year later, manufacturers such as Perfect World, Xishanju, and Shengqu Games also gathered together to form the "Global Cloud Game Industry Alliance".
In this context, are reliable cloud games still far from us?
Cloud gaming, is 5G enough?
Fang Liang, assistant general manager of Tencent Xianyou Cloud Games, said that in the past ten years, cloud games have been in a transitional state from the "first stage" to the "second stage":
The first stage is that the game can run on the cloud; the second stage is to reduce costs while improving the user experience, so that players can get an experience close to local games; the third stage is based on the characteristics of the cloud, and some native cloud game play Development. Tencent Xianyou cloud games are also in the process of turning to phase two. Tencent Xianyou app can support the cloudification of multi-terminal games and achieve the local gaming experience of some devices, but native cloud games are still under development.
As recognized as the earliest mature cloud game product, Onlive attracted the content support of EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Warner and other game manufacturers when it was launched. The ability to run 3A masterpieces such as "Crysis" undoubtedly made it a The biggest highlight of the exhibition that year. As a completely unfamiliar technology, the reason why cloud gaming is expected by the public is that it can solve three problems:
Source: Visual China
The game does not need to occupy local space, just click and play;
For games with high performance requirements, there is no need to purchase dedicated game equipment, and the hardware threshold is low;
The cloud computing power is far greater than the user client, so there is a chance to provide a better picture and experience.
However, advanced concepts did not bring widespread popularity to cloud gaming. On the one hand, the average household bandwidth in the United States at that time was only 9.54Mbps, and bandwidth limitations made it difficult for users to receive sufficiently clear images.
On the other hand, the implementation of cloud games was more primitive. The principle was to perform Hook DirectX video output on Windows, which not only brought higher latency, but also each instance can only correspond to one user, which is equivalent to each user There is a corresponding computer in the cloud, which is extremely expensive.
It is the two mountains of bandwidth and cost that have become the biggest bottleneck restricting the development of cloud games in the past decade.
If network transmission bandwidth relies on infrastructure, it needs to adapt to the development of communication technology. Then the balance between "user experience" and "operating cost" is a contradiction that is difficult to reconcile. Players pursue good graphics and low latency, but the better the graphics and low latency, the higher the cost of computing power and bandwidth; in turn, controlling costs will result in a decline in user experience.
This is also the reason why various manufacturers have entered the game when 5G accelerates popularization. The low latency and high bandwidth features of 5G can bring a better gaming experience and reduce platform costs; and mobile features also promote the release of gaming scenarios, which will increase the frequency of consumer use and improve cloud gaming. Further popularization.
But 5G alone is not enough. As mentioned earlier, the balance between user experience and operational efficiency costs is still a problem that cloud gaming platforms need to solve. According to the "2019 Cloud Game Industry Development White Paper" issued by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, "The main costs of cloud services include servers, IDC, and bandwidth (5G), while IDC and bandwidth costs are basically transparent."
This means that when everyone’s IDC and bandwidth costs are the same, more consumers can be covered with fewer devices, and servers and game platforms with a better experience can be provided to win more players and help The industry has brought faster popularity.
What's the difficulty with a reliable server?
"The technical requirements of cloud games are mainly virtualization, including kernel upgrades and server software and hardware optimization, as well as audio and video decoding and rendering capabilities." Fang Liang summarized the technical pain points of cloud games.
In other words, for cloud game service fees, these two capabilities are the most important:
First, while the performance is excellent enough, it can provide services for more players with lower cost and lower power consumption, which can effectively reduce deployment costs and allow more users to get a good experience while being exposed to cloud games;
The second problem is more concealed and often overlooked: the demand for computing power in cloud games does not just stop on the game screen. Audio and video need to be encoded and transmitted to consumers. The encoding capability determines the encoding delay and picture effects. In today's game picture quality is getting better and better, the video encoding capability of the chip is becoming more and more important.
The coding ability here is very different from the familiar video live broadcast: live broadcast is a one-to-many distribution method, that is, after encoding once, the pictures are distributed to the audience separately. In cloud games, each player has a different picture, which greatly increases the coding pressure of the GPU;
Source: Visual China
On the other hand, the delay standard of cloud games is much higher than that of live broadcast: when the player sees the screen, they will immediately operate the controller to give instructions, and this instruction will form a new screen and send it to the player after being sent to the cloud. The process is often at the millisecond level, far exceeding the live broadcast standard.
Therefore, in order to achieve better cloud gaming quality, in addition to being able to provide services to as many players as possible at a lower cost, it must also have good coding capabilities to ensure gaming experience. If the coding performance is not good, long-time coding will result in higher delay, and while the picture effect will be affected, bandwidth will be wasted.
Faced with such high demands, Tencent Xianyou platform has made various attempts. The last significant performance and effect improvement came from the Intel SG1 processor they used. Help the platform have flexible and diverse video coding capabilities, and build high-density, low-latency, low-power, and low-cost solutions on top of this.
Behind this, Intel, as a provider of hardware and solutions, is bringing more changes to the cloud gaming industry.
Combining software and hardware to fully promote cloud gaming
On November 9, Intel announced its first data center graphics card "SG1", which is also their independent GPU product launched again after 20 years. This "return" is quite targeted: application scenarios that require high-density media transcoding and encoding, led by cloud games.
Lynn, vice president of Intel’s data center, emphasized the advantages of SG1 in two application scenarios: “Android occupies 74% of the total market share in the ball game development ecosystem, and Android-based cloud games also have a high room for growth; on the other side , Is high-density media transcoding and media encoding. Imagine someone has made a lot of popular dance videos. When these videos spread like a virus, millions of people will want to make the same video. And this is The greatest manifestation of the advantages of high-density media transcoding."
As the first manufacturer to use this product, Fang Liang, assistant general manager of Tencent Xianyou, said: “On each SG1, 50 game instances such as "Glory of the King" can be run at the same time. There is an advantage beyond that. SG1 can run rendering and encoding together. This architecture will make the server more efficient."
Based on this server-side evolution, Tencent Xianyou can provide players with better visual effects on the one hand, and on the other hand, it can also solve the cost problem by optimizing the overall software and hardware:
First of all, the unit hardware supports more users, which can effectively operate and improve efficiency. A typical dual card system supports more than 100 concurrent users of Android cloud games, which can be expanded to 160 concurrent users.
Secondly, good video stream encoding performance reduces time delay, while larger concurrent traffic means less operating costs and clearer pictures on the user side.
Third, open up. Good open source software support can greatly save R&D costs and time.
Intel's support does not only come from hardware: at the same time as the release of GPU products, the oneAPI Gold toolkit will be launched in December this year. This is a vision for the realization of a unified and simplified cross-architecture programming model: without compromising on performance, there is no need to be restricted to a single vendor’s dedicated code. Developers can choose the best architecture for a specific problem, and there is no need to rewrite software for this architecture and platform.
Source: Intel official
The advantage of this API is that it is not only an adaptation to Intel's own chips, but also a complete solution across the entire industry. Jeff McVeigh, Vice President of Intel Data Center XPU Products and Solutions, said: "Even when there is no Intel chip installed in the system, oneAPI can provide support for it. This is an open industry specification that anyone can use. In fact It has been brought to the Nvidia GPU. On the other hand, we have established an organization with Heidelberg University, and they are providing more support for AMD’s GPU."
Judging from the results, just as cloud gaming lowers the threshold for players to play, Intel products also lower the technical threshold for cloud platforms. Prior to this, Tencent Xianyou had been operating for a year. After the release of SG1, they tested the performance of this GPU product for the first time. On the whole, it has a better price-performance ratio than the previous solution.
The popularization of cloud games will surely be accompanied by an increase in the scale of platforms and servers. Only in this way will the public truly enjoy an unrestricted gaming experience. The cooperation between Intel and Tencent Xianyou is just a representative application case. Whether it's the SG1 solution or the launch of the oneAPI toolkit, it may indicate that Intel has approached tens of millions of players for cloud gaming and added the last piece of the puzzle.
This article is reproduced from tiger sniffing APP, Author: Chandler Tiger